Rules for Fishy Trash?

Summary

Analysis of intrasite spatial variation can improve our understanding of the dynamics of daily living of past populations. Fish remains are a special type of trash with distinctive aspects of capture, transport, preparation, and discard when compared to other fauna. This paper focuses on the analysis of fish remains from the Chimu site of Cerro La Virgen (A.D. 1000-1470) on the north coast of Peru. Cerro La Virgen is a rural town of mixed economy, including both fishing and agriculture, linked by road to the Chimu capitol at Chan Chan. The sample reported in this paper comes from recent salvage excavations by Brian Billman and Jesus Briceño at a residential compound and an associated secondary midden. I use the result of my analysis to evaluate the variation in fish taxa and body parts from these contexts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Trash Rules: Intrasite Zooarchaeology

Keywords

Spatial Coverage